Denmark is on its way to becoming an organic food country
foodrevolution.org
foodrevolution.org
And exactly agriculture is one of the areas that the new government have changed a lot. It was growing into a big scandal around when this article was written, that cost the agriculture minister of that government her job.[0] So between when I am writing this post, and when Jørgensen said that in 2015, there have been three different agriculture ministers.
Given the new relaxed rules by the ministry on farmers and what they can do to the soil, I think it is safe to say that the ambitious plan that the article refers to has pretty much been scrapped.
The article is very out of date right now, but it was even out of date at the time it was written. The plan was published in January 2015. The general election was in early June 2015. The new agriculture law came into effect around February 2016 (but its contents was known by December 2015).
[0] https://www.thelocal.dk/20160229/danish-pm-announces-cabinet...
1) The UNCTAD report that is cited actually has the following text:
"The views expressed in the articles contained in this Review are the personal views of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of their respective organisations and institutions."
Many of the authors have ties with the organic industry (see https://thoughtscapism.com/2015/09/21/myth-un-calls-for-smal...)
2) Organic food has less pesticides exposure.
Not necessarily as organic agriculture also uses pesticides (naturally occuring ones). Though they tend to degrade quicker than synthetic ones, they are not as effective and need to be applied more often. Also the use of copper sulfate is allowed, which doesn't biodegrade and builds up in the soil.
The following is also completely rubbish
"Yes, pesticide residues are regulated by the U.S. Food Quality Protection Act, but the tolerance levels assigned for some pesticides pose potential health risks, even though they are considered “allowable.”"
3) Organic foods are more nutritious and taste better.
Nope. The article just cherry picks a few studies. Following meta study comes to conclusion that organic food is not more nutritious
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22944875
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11833635
4) Organic foods help achieve biodiversity and soil fertility
Maybe on the area farmed, but it tends to not be as efficient as conventional farming, so increase acreage is needed which reduces biodiversity.
Regarding soil fertility, GMOs have actually helped thanks to no till agriculture.
5)Organic foods have no GMOs.
GMOs actually can help reduce pesticide use (but its not a silver bullet)
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....
Also, on pesticides: organic pesticides are usually more toxic to humans than synthetic pesticides. (This makes a lot of sense: think of the optimization functions used to select pesticides in natural evolution versus synthetic production).
I did laugh on the "more nutritious and tastes better" bit. As you say, most studies and meta-studies find no effect on nutrition.
Actually, a better characterization could be "medieval ones". For instance, copper sulfate (CuSO4) is not exactly a "naturally occurring" substance, it's an industrial chemical but allowed in organic agriculture because it is a "traditional" pesticide (even though it is more toxic than, say, glyphosate, by a factor of 10).
Other than that, you make the points I would have made.
4) ...
Account the footprint of the chemical plant where fertilizers, pesticides, and machinery comes from. Look at the shipping footprint to get those inputs into your fields. Look at the energy source for spreading them. Then look at fertilizer- and pesticide-use externalities.
Conventional fields are net exporters of pollutants and species death. Whereas an ecologically rich field is going to actually filter water and net export richer biodiversity to it's surrounding ecosystem.
The "conventional" advantage is on money and time--not concentration of biomass or biological health.
The report they're referring to can be accessed here:
http://unctad.org/en/PublicationsLibrary/ditcted2012d3_en.pd...
That report is not an official statement by the United Nations nor any of its working groups. It's published by a UN committee, but it's merely a collection of papers by individual authors. They say right in the introduction (page 3) that the opinions expressed in it are not those of the United Nations or any of its member States. So it's misleading to call it a "report from the United Nations".
It's not even clear to me which article they're specifically referring to. I only skimmed it (it's 321 pages long) and did some keyword searches, but I don't see a direct "we must do only 'organic' farming or we all die" statement. Addressing concerns like crop monocultures can be done incrementally, without abandoning the benefits of pesticides and genetic modification.
But even then, when you're talking about 'feeding the world', crop yields are the name of the game. And my understanding is exactly the opposite of this article: crop yields under organic farming techniques is lower than conventional modern farming (by ~20% according to http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0308521X11...). Further, I recall that this gap is below the level to sustain the world's current population.
In other words, by advocating for 100% organic farming, you're intentionally advocating for a practice that will lead to starvation of part of the world's population. I can't see how that's conscionable.
That's at least $5 more than the $15 minimum wage the same class of workers are fighting for here (in the US).
https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_countries_resu...
But yes, a cheeseburger here costs 10 DKK. That's 1.50 USD. I don't know what a cheeseburger costs in the US, but I'd imagine it's 1 USD.
This has more to do with the cost of labour than that of the underlying food ingredients.
In Sweden we usually talk about marginal tax rates and how Denmark usually has got us beat on that front but it seems it's mostly their high VAT that makes that possible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_rates
I think I have too much of a scientific bent to understand the religious reasoning involved.
Avoiding hormones and antibiotics is more relevant. Carcinogens are everywhere.
I would say it's a simple everything-corporate-is-evil philosophy, but there are some pretty big corporations behind the alternative medicine/organic farming stuff that are good at hiding the fact that they're big corporations.
The article is quoting the previous government, by the way, the current one just announced it's going to cut the temporary subsidies given to farms switching to organic production.
Modern inorganic farming methods are necessary for feeding the world. If the whole world switched to organic farming, there would be cataclysmic mass starvation.
Really? Care to elaborate on that?
The article lists the many reasons why organic foods are better than non-organic ones. You should read it.
Pesticides, yummy.
It doesn't inspire much confidence on the other hand that the pushers of GMOs are huge conglomerates that control seeds (similarly to IP rights and DRM), would sell any BS for a quick buck, and are not that dissimilar to the tobacco industry that testified that "smoking is not harmful" and sponsored tons of studies in the 70s and 80s (with real scientists, universities et al) to prove that point.
But there is tons of food that is neither Organic (certified and pushed by Whole Foods etc) nor GMO.
You know, it's just food. And it's what we've been having for years, and 100% of what we do have now (I never buy Organic anyway, except if it's something not available as general foodstuff).
Organic doesn't mean pesticide free, far from it. Organic farms (especially big factory farms) use pesticides very liberally - "natural" pesticides. They don't have to be safer than synthetics in any way, you don't have to use less, they just have to be natural. So we spray crops with stuff like Copper or (mostly in the past) Rotenone[1].
We've stupidly classified all natural poisons as "non-toxic" and all synthetics as "horribly dangerous". Nature is full of stuff you don't want to spray on your food.
“The unfortunate truth is that until organic farming can rival the production output of conventional farming, its ecological cost due to the need for space is devastating. As bad as any of the pesticides and fertilizers polluting the world's waterways from conventional agriculture are, it's a far better ecological situation than destroying those key habitats altogether.”
Organic food is a misnomer.
Or rather, it's a label that comes with extra guarantees besides non-GMO, that not all make sense, and is there to make a quick buck on the upper middle class and the hippy types.
What's actually neither GMO nor Organic is plain food stuff, you know, the plain food that the planet produces, maybe with a few pesticides or some treatment that's a-ok, but doesn't qualify as Organic.
Of this (and of its Organic sibling) some of it is evolutionary created and consumed by humans for 10s of thousands of years, and other is cross-bread in a slow and limited process (e.g. not being able to do stuff like take fruit-fly genes to put into bananas) by farmers -- and still tested and consumed over centuries.
GMOs, on the other hand, are not "science" in the same way that while Donald Knuth or Djikstra is Computer Science, J2EE or the latest foobar.js some company pushes are not.
They are of course backed by science, but what they really are is applied technology as driven by business interests.
And often the same business interests that could (and some would) put poison in kid's milk, if it made for a cheaper product and higher margin.
I'd rather have food stuff that passed evolutionary tests, than the latest gene-mix from the inventors and pushers of HFCS and several other crappy quality food chemistry substances that increase their margins...
Then there's the whole seed-control with IP rights and forcing farmers to rebuy them (and not save them) year over year can of worms...
The seed control stuff is really just Monsanto being incredibly shitty at PR. See NPR[1]; also, in the past 10, 20 years or so, there's only been one lawsuit between Monsanto and farmers[2] (news flash: it was the farmers that sued Monsanto). Also, organic seeds get patented too, it's not just GMO seeds[3].
I also highly suggest you read William Saletan's article on GMO's[4]
Another fun fact: organic doesn't mean evolution-based. Mutagenesis and specially-grown cultivars have become an increasingly popular way to produce foods that get the organic label; it's only really transgenesis (gene splicing) that you can't say is organic.
To be clear: I'm not denying that there are despicable business practices out there (hell, did you know that there's actually a black market for stuff like olive oil and fish?), and that there is definitely something to be said for the US-EU split on the proper way to regulate GMO's, but organic is generally just a stupid concept.
[1] (http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2012/10/18/163034053/top...)
[2] (http://www.cafc.uscourts.gov/sites/default/files/opinions-or...)
[3] (https://www.geneticliteracyproject.org/2015/08/07/challengin...)
[4] (http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201...)
That's plainly incorrect.
Since the mid‑1990s, Monsanto indicates that it has filed suit against 145 individual U.S. farmers for patent infringement and/or breach of contract in connection with its genetically engineered seed but has proceeded through trial against only eleven farmers, all of which it won. The Center for Food Safety has listed 90 lawsuits through 2004 by Monsanto against farmers for claims of seed patent violations. (Wikipedia)
>Another fun fact: organic doesn't mean evolution-based. Mutagenesis and specially-grown cultivars have become an increasingly popular way to produce foods that get the organic label; it's only really transgenesis (gene splicing) that you can't say is organic.
I already addressed that though. Natural mutagenesis is still evolution (heck, it's one of the very engines of evolution), and I'm all for slow methods to produce foods (even if they cross species) over gene splicing, especially with the current (BS) level of knowledge that the gene splicers have over the possible consequences of what they are doing and the lack of scientific rigor when big business are involved.
>but organic is generally just a stupid concept.
Don't disagree much with that. Also noted that I don't particularly care for food with the label "organic" (which is an industry on its own, when it comes to certification, higher prices, etc.). Plain ole food-stuff is enough.
Edit: words
Agree.
> Modern inorganic farming methods are necessary for feeding the world. If the whole world switched to organic farming, there would be cataclysmic mass starvation.
Most certainly false! By reducing meat consumption or increasing labor intensity organic agriculture could easily support the whole world.
For many of the places where food security is needed the most, increased soil quality, as supported by organic agriculture, would help a lot. http://www.unep.org/pdf/SmallholderReport_WEB.pdf
I also favour "organic" eggs, because the chicken are treated better, even if that is not detectable in the quality of the eggs themselves.
But I agree that mostly "organic" is just a scam.
Denmark does many things better than the US ... such as bicycle lanes. But food isn't one of those things.
Plus, much of organic food theory is total pseudoscientific bunk.
Check out this survey of research on organic food in the Gimlet Media podcast: https://gimletmedia.com/episode/5-organic-food/
But seriously, food being expensive is not the same as not doing food right. The few times I've been in the US, I've always been disappointed about the food available in supermarkets. It's hard to find stuff such as good milk or butter.
But even if you are right, that doesn't mean a good should be so expensive ... just because it CAN be expensive.
Also, its easy for Danes to distort the cultivation practices abroad by encouraging low yield practices to entertain their organic fetish. But that reduced yield forces additional open space to be brought under cultivation ... reducing wild habitat.
There are ways of doing agriculture sustainably, with a mix of traditional practices and a measured and scientific use of fertilizer and pesticide. Just because pesticide and fertilizer can be abused, does not mean they are abusive by nature.
So, the cost comparison may be apt although this page, which compare cost of living between San Francisco and Denmark suggests that groceries in San Francisco are way more expensive (nearly 60%), although restaurants are cheaper (16%).
https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...
Not sure how reliable a source this is though.
I've travelled around Europe, food is very cheap in Central, Southern and Eastern Europe. It's basically Scandinavia that's expensive.
> Danes spend more than twice the percentage of their annual income on food than the their fellow Americans. Also the purchasing power of a US citizen is about 25% higher than that of a Danish citizen.
Source? I'm actually really curious.
In Scandinavia it's actually relatively "cheaper" to locals compared to central/eastern Europe, while Danes spend ~12% of their annual income on food Poles spend over 20%. That's because the price of many food products is actually relatively similar in most countries within the EU including local production but there is a pretty high disparity as far as annual income goes.
>Source? I'm actually really curious.
http://www.imf.org/external/ns/cs.aspx?id=28
Generate a report with the PPP rating.
US PPP is 55K Denmark is 45K, if you care about take home wage then the US is also higher https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_net_take-... Overall the US has cheaper housing, transportation, food and local services combined with considerably lower tax burden than Europe.
Ex: http://www.hrsa.gov/ruralhealth/ yes these things are not intended as a food subsidy but low population areas have higher costs for many things which would otherwise raise food prices. Economically only a fraction of rural aid lowers food prices, but the net effect is significant.
The US spends about 20 bln $....
Still nobody tops Japan per capita in direct subsides as they have USD$46.5 billion in subsidies, and a population of ~126 million.
PS: It's really hard to get a single subsidy number as laws are designed so things can be presented in many different ways. AKA, US calls something specific an income tax while excluding social security.
Purchasing power is more evenly distributed, though, i.e. the poorest have better purchasing power.
By OECD purchasing power comparison, Denmark is 26 % more expensive than U.S. And workers have, on average, 15 % lower wages in Denmark.
http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=CPL
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_w...
This is a common misconception, the poor in the US are as rich or richer than the middle class in the EU.
https://mises.org/blog/poor-us-are-richer-middle-class-much-...
Also, while you sort of mention it, I think using averages when the distribution is clearly skewed is a really bad practice. It doesn't help us develop intuition on how things are for most people.
I live in Austria where food is also expensive and most is organic but that's mainly because there is a 20% VAT tax on it, not because production is that much more expensive.
I do think that our vegetables are tastier than in the US but I doubt it has anything to do with organic.
That podcast guest is shit--food from ecological systems is absolutely better tasting. Ask any decent chef (myself included).
The idea that "organic food theory is bunk" is really hand-wavy. The importance of organic is the emphasis on ecology and soil health. Basically, life is made of carbon. So farms that are rich in life hold onto carbon. Whereas factory farm systems rely on monocrops, pesticides, and fertilizers, which sterilize life. These practices get an initial productivity bump, but end up depleting carrying capacity over several seasons. Subsidies are the crutch that keeps all that going.
Organic food theory is bunk. The double blind taste tests prove, scientifically that your better taste theory is wrong. You know you can grow heirloom varieties and perishable varieties with pesticide and fertilizer too right? Just because people grow perishable and heirloom varieties with organic methods, because rich people like organic, and rich people pay for these lower yielding varieties also, doesn't make these factors inherently confounded. You can separate them if consumer tastes at the top of the market change.
My family grows very delicious fruit and vegetable by using a judicious amount of pesticide and fertilizer, in a sustainable way, in central california. We practice crop rotation in our vegetable gardens (but our primary crop is walnuts which does not allow for crop rotation ... but we are exploring mixed use ... but harvesting constraints and other issues dominate the calculation on whether crop mixing is feasible there).
I am a programmer in San Francisco, and my father would probably have been one in 1970 if such a career was available to him then. He is a really smart guy. You think he is an idiot who doesn't examine all the issues when choosing to use pesticide and fertilizer? Our land has been in our family for almost a century. It is still yielding well. We know very well how to farm sustainably.
Edit: as for subsidies, we don't want them. But we live in a market where prices are determined by them. Subsidies are bad. But, we cannot remove subsidies as individuals. And I disagree that low prices are a result of subsidies in the aggregate. They are certainly for specific crops ... and certainly for meat. But unless you consider water use a subsidy, I don't think food would get 50% more expensive without subsidies. Total US Ag subsidies is around $20 Billion while the size of the Ag sector is like $900Billion. 20 Billion removal will not effect an almost 1 Trillion dollar market in such a drastic way. Specific crops will be more expensive, but on the whole, agriculture will migrate to better, unconventional crops. We will actually meet market demand BETTER once subsidies don't distort our crop choices.
What that study you linked to shows is that people interpret flavor with high suggestibility for the food's origin. They were misrepresenting origin to tasters--not just blindly tasting things. Plus, they were only looking at tomatoes. I guarantee if you run a completely blind experiment (with no suggestion bias) with peaches, gourds, or any meat product--factory system loses.
But the main point is that farmers have to make choices. To the extent that subsidies make factory-model decisions more viable--this leads to more food that is artificially cheap. And unpriced negative externalities are a form of subsidy. You can exploit a farm's ecological endowment or invest in it. If prices were perfect--investing in ecological richness would be more heavily rewarded.
I would argue, that using some pesticide and fertilizer is BETTER than pure organic methods, because you will not only grow delicious crops, you will have the luxury of trying some varieties which, while delicious, are too sensitive to disease to exploit commercially otherwise.
Edit:
There are many methods championed by organic farmers that do produce tastier food. But those methods are not tied to not using fertilizers and pesticides from factories. And while I credit them with introducing those methods. Those methods can be hybridized with the use of fertilizer and pesticide to get both yield and taste up.
In the case of meat, its clear that factory farmed chicken is garbage. Free range chicken tastes much better. We can use some scientific methods to discover what makes the free range chicken taste better, rather than accepting like religion that just putting them in a free roam yard is the reason for the flavor.
"Judiciously used", by the meaning of the words, limits what it describes to cases where it is in fact the right set of decisions. The injudicious cases are the ones I'm interested in picking out.
If you have a pest or pathogen problem that is recurring, applying RoundUp or some other chemical combatant is not as good as introducing a rotation or a biological competitor or predator. If you're soil is consistently deficient in certain elements--the overall better strategy is to introduce organic matter that feeds life in the soil (rotations, compost, etc.), rather than applying a factory-made fertilizer. The factory input just isn't as sustainable season-to-season as feeding biological matter into the soil.
There are also several perspectives from which to measure outcomes, that may have conflicting interpretations--flavor, nutrition, ecological impact, short-term vs long-term economics, etc.
So to the point that Denmark encourages good long-term economics, ecological impact, flavor, and nutrition--it's a good, sustainable project.
Have you done any (double blind) A/B testing to conclude this? Argument from authority (even if they are decent chefs) doesn't count.
There tends to be more than one angle on organic food
1. It's more nutritious than non-organic cultivation
2. It's more flavourful
3. It's less damaging to the environment
I can't speak for the veracity of reasons 2 or 3 (although, anecdotally, supermarket organic produce seems just as bland and tasteless than the non-organic variety), but reason 1 was challenged some years ago (2008) by an independent study. The study was commissioned by the UK's Food Standards Agency. An overview:
http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20120206100416/htt...
The final report: Systematic review of differences in nutrient content of organically and conventionally produced food
http://tna.europarchive.org/20100929190231/http://www.food.g...
I agree that the idea of Frankenfood is hysteria. My fear of GMO's is due to my distrust of Monsanto, their near monopoly position in the global food supply, the legal tactics they use to bankrupt farmers for having the unmitigated gall to unwittingly use Monsanto seeds that blew onto their farm, and their regulatory capture of the FDA. There is a revolving door of former politicians they employ.
It's also unconscionable how they're able to ram through legislation that removes labeling of foods that are GMO's. Even if someone has an irrational fear of GMO's, they should still have the right to know the origin of their foods. Logic clearly dictates that the rights of the many outweigh the avarice of the few. God forbid they should try to educate the public on their safety or be open and transparent about their products.
Monsanto revenues are 15 billion USD, global food supply market is 7800 billion USD. Monsanto, including all its non-food-related businesses, is about 0.2 % of global food supply business.
"Organic" food business revenue, also just a niche globally, is about 5 times as big as Monsanto's revenue.
>legal tactics they use to bankrupt farmers for having the unmitigated gall to unwittingly use Monsanto seeds that blew onto their farm
That is a claim widely spread by Monsanto's adversaries, but it is simply not true. The case usually referred to is Monsanto Canada vs. Schmeiser, and it very clearly wasn't about "unwittingly" using Monsanto seeds. Schmeiser didn't even make such a claim in court, it's just a fabrication by anti-GMO activists.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_Canada_Inc_v_Schmeise...
I just have a marked distrust of any organization that employs regulatory capture as evident as Monsanto.
The point about food labeling still stands though. It's true that a little information in the hands of the ignorant can be dangerous, but that is the cost of living in a free and democratic society and individual choice. Putting corporate interests over the freedom of information rarely, if ever, works out well. Monsanto has the resources and the former politicians to do effective public outreach and education. That they would rather use legislation makes them seem, at best, not worthy of trust.